20 years of Doom: the game that put a gun in your hand

Two decades ago, the violent first-person shooter Doom changed the face of
video games for ever, writes Sam Rowe

It was the video game that birthed an entire genre. One whose three-dimensional, pixelated gore both enthralled and appalled a society reared on blasting asteroids and playing virtual ping-pong.

It spawned two sequels, four novels, a comic book and a fleet of gaming imitators, although the less said about the critically panned Karl Urban and The Rock-starring movie, the better. Today marks 20 years since Doom was first released and, depending on whom you’re asking, is either the most influential gaming title of all time, or a devil-worshipping "mass murder simulator" that led to real life slaughter.

Taking its name from what Tom Cruise’s pool-playing character christens his cue in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 film The Color of Money, Doom hit the market like a class A Drug in 1993 – distributed freely over the internet, on floppy disk or CD-ROM – with the shareware version estimated to have been installed on 10 million computers by 1995. Centred around a nameless marine (affectionately nicknamed "Doomguy" by fans) incarcerated on Mars and thrown into a one-man battle against a legion of monsters sent from hell, Doom’s labyrinthine levels, hallowed power ups and boundary pushing graphics enraptured gamers, along with its explicit gore and arsenal of weapons. These included a shotgun, brass-knuckles, chainsaw, rocket launcher, plasma gun and immensely powerful BFG9000 (the "B" and "G" stand for "Big" and "Gun" – suffice to say the "F" doesn’t stand for friendly).

Although Doom wasn’t the first title to present gameplay from the perspective of the player – the earliest first person shooters go as far back as the mid ’70s – it popularised the genre to such an extent that for years, all FPS games released were dubbed "Doom clones". This means the likes of Call of Duty, with its Hollywood sized budget, cinematic gameplay and celebrity advocates, owes the Martian shoot-em-up a debt of gratitude.

Alongside its single-player game, another facet to Doom’s market-conquering appeal was co-operative and "Deathmatch" modes, putting rival players in the same game for the first time, via an Ethernet cable.

You need look no further than Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network and their respective gluttony of players worldwide, for legacy on that front. Doom also encouraged its mouse-grasping players to turn architect, with the game fully modifiable for fans to curate and share their own levels online. Such a success was this amongst Doom loyalists, that levels are still regularly uploaded to the web on a daily basis now, two decades on.

But, for every bit of success, there was a piece of controversy to accompany Doom. Outlawed in many workplaces due to its productivity sapping and network draining qualities caused by inter-office deathmatches, Doom - ranked the third most controversial game of all time by CNN in 2011 – was condemned by the church for its satanic imagery and diabolic undertones, and was infamously banned across Germany in 1994. This ban was only lifted four years ago, upon appeal by game makers id Software, who successfully argued Doom’s graphic content was suitably priggish compared to the blood-spattered titles of today.

The game found itself back in the headlines in 1999, during the fallout of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, as it came to light that perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid Doom players, designed their own levels and that Harris even nicknamed his shotgun "Arlene" – a character from the Doom novels.

But, irrespective of the public condemnation, and claims that the game produced a generation of adolescent assassins, we should give thanks for Doom's nameless, low-res action hero. He just may have made the modern, multi-billion pound games industry what it is today. And not even Super Mario can claim that.